Thursday, 30 May 2024

Housing

Samantha RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (17:37): (931) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Premier, and I ask her to take the housing crisis seriously and build urgently needed public housing. It is a well-worn path in this country – when things get tough some politicians start blaming everyone but themselves. It might start with blaming other levels of government, the community or past governments, and when they run out of people to blame they start blaming immigrants. It is lazy, dangerous and immoral, but that does not seem to stop the likes of Peter Dutton and now Labor too going for the easiest scapegoat. While it is a path that has a history in racism and the White Australia policy, most recently it has been revived by the likes of Pauline Hanson. For many young people at the time like me who were growing up as migrants in Australia, it was a devastating blow to multiculturalism and feeling welcome here. So to see this kind of scapegoating, othering, demonising and blaming of immigrants for all the problems of the world ratchet up again has many of us reeling.

The issues people are dealing with in their everyday lives in Australia right now, whether it is struggling to put food on the table, finding an affordable home or not being able to access essential services, are squarely the fault of governments who are too beholden to corporations, their big donors and vested interests to take the kind of action that we urgently need. Let us talk about the causes of the housing crisis.

Members interjecting.

The PRESIDENT: Order! Dr Ratnam has got the call.

Samantha RATNAM: Since 2020 we have built 600,000 homes. Property investors purchased almost 600,000 homes. At the same time over a million homes sat empty and 300,000 new migrant households arrived. You do not have to be a maths scholar to see that something does not add up about this claim that immigrants are to blame for everything.

Let us talk about what is really going on here. Labor have been retreating from public housing, including here in Victoria, where they plan to demolish and privatise it. We continue to give big tax breaks to investors. We will not do anything to free up homes for renters, like a cap on short-stay accommodation or freezing rents to make them affordable. Governments refuse to ask property developers to build enough affordable housing through inclusionary zoning and instead continue to subsidise them.

Over 6 per cent of all public housing dwellings are sitting empty in Victoria right now while the waitlist is 120,000 long. Whole floors of luxury apartments are sitting empty while investors wait for their value to grow. Young people are left without hope of ever affording their own home. This is the housing system that Labor and the Liberals have delivered. Now they are turning around and blaming immigrants. The reality in this country is that the majority of us are migrants. Not only is blaming immigrants for problems they did not create socially and morally objectionable, it is also economically negligent. Most migrants arrive here with skills that we desperately need, especially in the regions. Migration is vital for productivity, and if we do not maintain a good ratio of working age to retired people, our country is headed for an economic cliff. When you misattribute blame for the housing crisis on to immigrants and when you demonise, generalise and stereotype, it is not just bad policy, it is racism.